A new IBM (IBM) study of 500 hybrid cloud implementers worldwide indicated the majority of organizations that currently leverage hybrid cloud said they already have gained a competitive advantage from it.

Does Hybrid Cloud Provide Organizations With a Competitive Advantage?

A new IBM (IBM) study of 500 hybrid cloud implementers worldwide indicated the majority of organizations that currently leverage hybrid cloud said they already have gained a competitive advantage from it. Here are the details.

A new IBM (IBM) study of 500 hybrid cloud implementers worldwide indicated the majority of organizations that currently leverage hybrid cloud said they already have gained a competitive advantage from it.

The study, titled "Growing up Hybrid: Accelerating digital transformation," showed 26 percent of respondents said they are gaining a competitive advantage through hybrid cloud and using it to manage their IT environment in "an integrated, comprehensive fashion for high visibility and control."

Other study results included:

90 percent of organizational leaders said they believe hybrid cloud is crucial to their business strategy and success.

85 percent of leaders reported that a hybrid approach to cloud is accelerating the digital transformation in their organization.

Leaders are five times more likely to be using hybrid cloud for cognitive computing such as predictive intelligence and machine learning.

Leaders are almost three times more likely than other implementers to use hybrid cloud for commercializing insights.

Over one third of leaders are using hybrid cloud to enable Internet of Things (IoT).

"We live in a world where companies must take advantage of all of their resources to succeed and deliver services and apps in an as a service model regardless of whether they reside in a public or private cloud or on their existing infrastructure," Laura Sanders, IBM Global Technology Services' general manager for systems services, said in a prepared statement. "Not surprisingly, clients are seeing great value from hybrid environments in driving business results and transformation. It's a positive balance of optimization with flexibility and agility."

IBM pointed out these implementations "leverage existing IT resources while integrating into public and private cloud environments ... [to give] organizations greater control of their data, improved application performance and efficiencies [and] enhanced collaboration all while helping to centralize IT management."

As such, organizations may be able to use hybrid cloud to reduce their IT costs and become more efficient, according to IBM.

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